An evening or two ago, as my wife and I were spending a typical,
quiet, enjoyable evening together she revealed to me that it had
only recently occurred to her that there were parts of her that I
still didn’t know. We’re about halfway through our second year
together, and enjoy a relationship that just keeps getting better,
and her words seemed odd at first. I pondered for a moment. I
thought of all those times I’d suffered one way or another because
of that inherant male penchant of refusing to ask for directions,
and, not wanting to become hopelessly lost, I asked, "What kind
of parts?" I mean the possibilities are endless. Was she a
convicted ax murderess who had been evading Canadian authorities
for years? Did she spend her days poking pins into a short, fat,
balding doll? That would explain my backache. Did she know where
Jimmy Hoffa’s body is, or know who really was in that grassy knoll?
What parts? But the answer was much less exciting and much more
innocent. There are, she said, parts of her that pertained to other
times, other situations, other relationships. Ways of acting and
reacting that just simply don’t happen any more. I breathed a sigh
of relief, cancelled plans to phone the FBI, crossed "dead bolt for
the bathroom door" off my shopping list, and then my thoughts turned
toward some of my mechanical experiences.

No doubt you, at one time or other, have shared an experience like
so many of mine. Something breaks, something stops running, somethingneeds fixing and you think some illogical thought akin to, "Why pay somebody to look at it? I’ll fix it myself." But God is merciful, andonce in a while, by His amazing grace, it actually works. We actually repair the toaster or change those spark plugs or get the grandfatherclock ticking again of make the VCR stop eating Barney tapes. Thing is, as often as not we have parts left over. A spring here, a bolt there, a nut here, and something we don’t really recognize over yonder. But we wind it up, plug it in, turn it on or start it up and it works!
Maybe even better than it did before. That’s the kind of thing she
was talking about. Left over parts. God takes an old life, puts it back
together, and makes it work much better than it did before it broke,
and leaves behind the left over parts that we didn’t need to start
with. And once in a while we find one of them laying around somewhere
and realize, "Know what? I never needed that in the first place.

Maybe that’s what Paul was talking about when he said, "Brethren,
I count not myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do;
forgetting those which are behind, and reaching forth unto
those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." (Phillipians 3:13, 14)

Looks like he might have had a left over spring or two, himself.
Just a thought